Week 8: Tripping Point

Note Outline:

Tripping Point
We discussed the principle of the “tripping point.” A “tripping point” is simply the point where a person trips up. For some people they trip up when they associate with a certain person. Some people trip after a certain period of time – they can only seem to last so long before they trip up. Others trip up when something good happens in their life. Knowing what your tripping point is can help a person prepare and move beyond the tripping point to a better life.

The Power of Association:
Be careful who you take advice from, you might get their results. A person cannot give you advice to achieve better results than their own. How can they lead you to someplace they have never been? If someone doesn’t know how to play the piano, they really can’t help you learn to play the piano.
Associate with people, books, groups that will support you in your purpose, that will help you live a life of excellence! Life Leadership is a community that encourages people with principle based information and encourages excellence.

The Oak Tree and The Acorn
I shared a metaphor that helps us understand adversity in life. Before an acorn can reach its’ potential of being a mighty oak, it must first fall from the parent tree. Then it must be buried in the soil, otherwise it will be squirrel food. Once it is covered in soil, with sunlight and rain the conditions are right for it to germinate. It begins to change, it obviously doesn’t just grow into a larger acorn. It has to let go of the old identity of acorn and become something more. It sends out a root, and a stem pushes through the soil up into the light. It produces leaves, and continues to grow until it is a fully developed oak. We are like the acorn. We need to go through a metamorphosis, but first we must be buried. In this metaphor, it is the adversity of life that buries us; our challenges, our painful experiences put us in a position where we can grown. Without adversity in life, we would never become what we have the potential to become. Every challenge brings with it an opportunity to become something more, someone better. It is working through these challenges, pushing through the darkness up to the light, that changes us from a self-centered person to a person who reaches out to make the world a better place, and allows us to experience true joy in life.

Magnifying Glass Focus
A magnifying glass can take light that is spread across an wider area, and concentrates it into focused beam of light. This focused beam of light has the capacity to ignite small items, start a fire! We need to be like a magnifying glass and focus our thoughts, our intention, our energy on our purpose. If our thoughts are scattered with no focus, not much will happen. But when we gather all of our thoughts and energy and focus it toward a specific purpose, we can ignite things in our life. We can catch fire and really move forward in our purpose!
When you chooses to think about something, your are choosing to not think about countless other things. In that moment you are saying this one thing is more important to me than all the other things I could be thinking about. Consciously we can only think of one thing at a time – are we choosing a thought that will move us forward? Or not?

Reviewed the principle that the story we tell ourselves about what happened has a bigger impact on us than what happened.